Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

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One thing that bothers me about silicon valley influenced thinking is that "business idea" always seems to mean "disruptive startup that changes the world and makes billions."

Business doesn't have to mean that sort of business. Some guy making $3000 a month selling t-shirts and coffee mugs on etsy has, what I would think of, as a good business. Someone opening up a hotdog stand making $4000 also has a good business.

I noticed this in Zambia, lots of people standing by the side of the road selling soda pop and cigarettes or dried fish, or whatever they could get their hands on. Great businesses, great ideas, I'm glad they're doing it and I commend them for it.

The signs this article talks about are extremely limiting, to the point where the author is saying most people shouldn't bother. I think they apply for starting a big disruptive tech startup. I don't think they apply to an etsy store or hot dog stand, and those are viable and fairly easy to reach businesses. Personally I'd much rather focus on the easily attainable later sort of business rather than focus my time and energy in a quixotic effort to try and be the next Musk or Zuckerberg.

If someone's business is self sustaining and supports somebody's lifestyle, it's successful as far as I'm concerned. Ultimately that should be the basis behind a business. This is just my own likely, uninformed opinion but I feel this attitude of ever constant growth above all else is ultimately harmful and in the end actually ends up stifling innovation and creativity.

A small comfortable business with some extra revenue is probably more likely to take some risks ans come up with something new than a large corporation focussed on maximizing revenue growth. The amount of capital the smaller business has available may be less, but what good is capital if you're not willing to innovate and try new things.

In a lot of ways it's kind of like the indie vs AAA games market. Small indie games may not be as visually impressive or make as much money as those epic AAA games, with photorealistic graphics and Oscar award winning cutscenes, but the good ones sre usually pretty innovative and offer quality gameplay a lot of those larger games focused on wide appeal and maximizing profit.

Case in point: who would have ever set out to make Minecraft? The only reason to do it the way it was done was due to the constraints on capital expenditure. Lately I've been playing Dragon Quest Builders 2 and it's awesome. It mixes a block building sandbox game with a more traditional RPG. The thing that makes the game, though, is the blocks. Building with blocks is simple, intuitive and incredibly fun. But I don't think anybody would have sat down and thought "Building with blocks is just good UX" unless they had some reason to try it.

Context matters. On an NGO forum talking about entrepreneurship in third world states and micro-loans, I would not expect a discussion of business ideas to include advice on starting mass scale VC funded internet startups. Similarly in the blog of a Silicon Valley startup founder I would be surprised to see advice, stated to be aimed at his peers, to include tips on starting a roadside stall in Zambia. These forums exist for different purposes and have value in their own context, without having to compete with each other. They're just different things.

And also, I never started a business but from my observation, when you do something small that works it might serve as a base on which you grow something bigger in natural way that is more obvious.

Forget about 3000 a month, some people have very 'simple' businesses like clothing retail and earn way above engineers salary, which is really what a lot of entrepreneurs want at the end of the day. There's nothing new or innovative about these ideas other than maybe the right branding or location, but it goes over the tech industry's heads here because their venture capitalist overlords are telling them to work on unicorn ideas because they want to make billions, when most founders would be content with just making millions.

Or maybe VC's actually want to change the world and don't care about profit? I'll just take the money, thanks.

which is really what a lot of entrepreneurs want at the end of the day.

I'm not even sure about that. I saw a paper recently that showed earnings for entrepreneurs is similar to employees. It's only the bottom and top deciles where it varies. The bottom 10% don't earn anything and the top 10% earn significantly more.

In the middle are a lot of people who are broadly happy with their lot and mostly do it because they don't like working for someone else. They seemed to have little aspiration to expand or grow the business.

Some people are making good money because they are in a business that is considered unattractive, for example waste disposal. On the other hand, in an industry that is considered "cool" (like gaming or fashion) some people have a tendency for self exploitation, because they are willing to do just about everything to be in that industry. In those industries you will find quite a few people (especially self-employed) with big dreams and very little income.

It seems to me that the ideal there would involve retiring off of a cushy waste-disposal salary, and then working on gaming or fashion as an independently-wealthy hobbyist.

I just finished my part of a project where we installed ~$50k worth of AV & networking bits into a local fellow's home. He chose to do it more or less on a whim, because he could. His business? Portapotty rentals. As far as I'm concerned, good for him.

One entrepreneur conference I attended, a speaker stressed that novelty was not an advantage, it was a risk. It had to be very important to justify that risk. A totally new product/IP, a new customer, a new marketing channel, were all risks and not advantages.

The ideal startup from that point of view, would be 'a better mousetrap'.

And also why would you want to be like Musk or Zuckerberg? They both seem super weird. And IIRC Musk actually said "you don't want to be me".

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